Schools — places where our children go to learn. What makes a healthy and supportive learning environment? More police officers than counselors demonstrates such a distortion of priorities (and intentions).

AND… it’s also a concrete data point that we could shift. These systems aren’t functioning effectively. Changing them will involve massive investments of energy and involvement from all kinds of different people. Are we capable of working together to move mountains? One step at a time?

“As a nation, we’re nibbling around the edges with accountability measures and other reforms, but we’re ignoring the immutable core issue: much of white and wealthy America is perfectly happy with segregated schools and inequity in funding. We have the schools we have, because people who can afford better get better. And sadly, people who can’t afford better just get less–less experienced teachers, inadequate funding and inferior facilities.

Middle class America would never allow the conditions that have become normalized in poor and brown America to stand for their kids.

The images coming out of Detroit Public Schools: buckled floors, toilets without seats, roaches, mold and even mushrooms growing in damp, disgusting, mildewy classrooms. Like the images of American torture and abuse last decade in Abu Ghraib, these images should have shocked the nation. Instead, they elicited a collective national shrug, stretch and yawn.

The View from the Burbs is Sweet. Through white flight and suburbanization, wealthy and middle class families have completely insulated themselves from educational inequality. They send their kids to homogeneous schools and they do what it takes, politically at the local level, to ensure they’re well-funded, well-staffed, with opportunities for enrichment and exploration.

I spoke to a veteran teacher (17 years in the classroom) from Maryland. Her school is located five miles from the nation’s capitol and in her career, she has never taught a white student. Never. Her county and its schools are completely segregated. We aren’t in this together.

Our most needy students need our best teachers, yet our highest need schools have the least experienced teachers, the most turnover and are becoming burnout factories for those who remain. All the existing structural incentives for effective educators push them toward work in suburban schools, where they’ll be better supported and the workload is sustainable. Nobody wants to talk about this.”

Unfortunately in the U.S. we are not often taught the brilliance of people of African decent in our schools and text books. Do you know the inventors and scientists who are responsible for micro processing chips, telephones and railway trains, chemotherapy, digital cellular networks, traffic lights and gas masks, programmable remote control, laser eye probe surgery, microphone, handheld computers, fiber optics, and so much more? To truly be educated (and not miseducated) we have to take learning and history into our own hands. If you’re a parent, make sure your children are learning this history.